AdWords - Display

Support for installing and using AdCurve's Google AdWords Display connector

Written by Sam O'Neill Updated over a week ago

AdWords Display advertising for retailers provides the ability to create distribute visual ads for your shop across a wide advertising network, and to create dynamic ads to re-market your products.

If you have a Dynamic Display campaign in Adwords, you will be able to serve re-marketing ads to visitors who have shown an interest in your products, or look-alike marketing to find new customers who are likely to be interested in your product

To use the Adwords Display connector you will need to have an account with Google AdWords, and if using the Dynamic Display option you will also need an account for the Google Merchant Center.

AdWords Display contents:

1. Installing the AdWords Connector

3. Tag Settings

4. Connection Settings

5. Adding a tracking template in AdWords

1. Installing the AdWords Display Connector

The AdWords Display connector for AdCurve can be found in the AdCurve Appstore. If you’re having difficulty finding it, try using the "Display" filter to narrow your results. Once you’ve opened the details page for AdWords, press the “Install Connector” button to get started.

Before getting started, please ensure that you have pop-ups enabled, if you’re unsure of how to do so, please select your browser for further instructions: Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox.

Step 1: Costs

During the install process, the Connector Wizard will ask you to log into your Adwords account. The AdCurve Cost Connection collects the costs of your ads from Google on a daily basis to ensure that we can provide you with the most accurate data on your campaigns.

Once you’ve pressed the “Connect to Google Adwords” button, you’ll see a prompt to grant AdCurve access to your Google Account.

After granting access you’ll be presented with a drop down menu to select which Adwords account to use. If you have multiple Adwords accounts linked to your Google Account, please select the account you use for your shop.

Step 2: Tags

Google “Conversion Tracking” allows you to see valuable data about how your Google ads lead to customer activity such as completed orders.

Before you can set this up with AdCurve, you’ll need to have created some “Conversion Actions” in your Adwords accounts. If you’re not familiar with conversion actions, or need some help getting started, you can read more about it here. Alternatively, if you're just getting started and don't want to set this up quite yet, you can skip this this step by pressing continue without entering any values.

Once your conversion action is set up, you can open the conversion action to find the tracking tag.

(This is the complete tag if you were adding the code to your website, however we only need small parts of it to enable conversion tags within the AdCurve Tag Manager.)

Copy the values only next to “var_google_conversion_id” and “var_google_conversion_label” from the code, and paste these values into the Google conversion id and Google conversion label fields in the install wizard. Make sure that you remove the quotation marks from the conversion label when entering it in AdCurve.

Step 3: Feed

Use the AdCurve Feed: (Dynamic Display only)

If you use the AdCurve feed for Dynamic Display, this will allow you to manage your feed, implement tips, and add additional content to your feed for AdWords. The optimization features in AdCurve rely on you using the AdCurve Feed.

Keep my Current Feed:

You can opt to keep your current feed. This will mean that you still have access to most of the same data (we may miss some visits if we can't add tracking parameters to your product page links), but you won’t be able to make any changes or optimizations to your AdWords feed.

Once you’ve chosen a feed, the connector wizard will be complete, and you’ll be redirected to the settings page for AdWords Display. If for any reason the connector wizard did not complete, you can resume the setup process from the dashboard.

You'll need to set up your Display campaigns through AdWords, but the product feed for Dynamic Display is managed through your Google Merchant Center. Before you can do this you will need to ensure that your Merchant Center and AdWords are linked.

The feed contains all of your product details, formatted specifically for AdWords so that they can “collect” the feed and create product listing ads.

We will email you the location of your feed at the end of the connector install wizard, but you can also copy the location quickly at any time in Ad Management using the Feed tab on the far right.

Next you’ll need to log in to the Google Merchant Centre, and create a new feed using the blue + button on the Feeds tab.

On the first page of the feed setup process you’ll need to specify whether to create this as a standard (live) feed, or a test feed. If you already have an active AdWords Display feed and want to test the outcome of the AdCurve feed, select test, otherwise, select standard.

You’ll also need to give your new feed a name. This name can be anything you want, but we recommend making it something you’ll easily remember and recognize as your AdCurve feed.

On the final step for a feed setup you’ll need to set a schedule for Google to collect your feed. The default setting is daily at 5:00am, and we recommend you stick with this setting as it ensures your feed is updated every morning with any changes you might have made the previous day. The time-zone should default to the correct location, but ensure that you check it’s correct before proceeding.

Finally, paste the feed location you copied from AdCurve into the “File URL” box to ensure that Google has the correct address for collecting your feed. The “Filename”, “Username” and “Password” fields can be left blank.

Google will attempt to do an initial collection of your feed as soon as possible upon completion of the setup process. This will normally take a few hours, but can sometimes take 24-48 hours. If your feed collection is taking longer than this, please contact Google support for further assistance.

3. Tag Settings

On the Publisher Settings page you can edit the tag settings, if you need to change the tag settings, or add a tag if you skipped it during the initial installation wizard.

The conversion id and conversion label are variables specific to your Google account, as described above.

The "Enable conversion tracking tag" option allows you to toggle the conversion tracking off or on. If set to disabled, the tags won't be active on your shop website and no conversion events will be trackable through AdWords.

You can also choose test mode that will add the parameter "_test" to your transaction IDs in AdWords if you need to test the tags.

4. Connection Settings

When successfully connected to an AdWords account, the connection tab in the publisher settings will display this status, and provide the option for you to disconnect your account.

Disconnecting will completely remove your AdWords account from AdCurve and stop the offline authorization for AdCurve to collect your costs.

To reconnect using a different account, or a different AdWords account linked to the same Google Account, you can use the "Connect" button to log back in, and then confirm the AdWords account to grant AdCurve offline access.

5. Adding a tracking template in AdWords

In order to accurately track the visits and costs for individual ads, AdCurve needs to add a tracking template to the ads that Adwords creates.

First you need to log in to AdWords and select the campaign you use for AdWords Display and head to the settings tab.

At the bottom of this settings page under Advanced Settings there will be an option called Campaign URL options (advanced)

Here you can add the tracking template parameter that AdCurve requires to tracking the visits and costs for your ad. The tracking template is specific the the country where you are advertising.

United States: {lpurl}?s2m_channel=1852&ad_id={creative}

Netherlands: {lpurl}?s2m_channel=79&ad_id={creative}

Once you've added the template, you'll have the option to test it to check that the URLs being generated are still correct and pointing at your product pages before saving the setting.

It is sometimes possible to set the tracking template for an Ad set or even individual Ads. To ensure that the template is successfully included in your ads it's important that the tracking template is set up for the whole Campaign or Ad Set, and not for individual Ads.

If you need any further support with AdWords Display, or if something is missing from our article, please don't hesitate to start a chat with us at any time using the Intercom button in the bottom right of your screen.